pasadoble: yeah, i'm thinking that's my best bet. i'm either going to pick up a used Dell laptop that's a couple years old or build a mini/micro-ATX machine and have lounge lizard as a startup item, so i could run the computer headless on stage. that would only run me around $150 sans software! (There's no way I'd bring my precious iBook on tour, heheh)

booby: wow, thanks for linking to those soft synths! I'm definitely going to check them out once i get my windows box back up and running!